F19 Final criteria revamp

[Chris Murphy]

On Jun 10, 2013, at 12:27 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 2013-06-10 at 08:38 -0400, Chris Murphy wrote:
> 
>> b. For BIOS installs, the requirement for the bootloader to boot both
>> Windows and Fedora is reasonable. It's probably not reasonable, still,
>> for UEFI. GRUB2+os-prober really isn't acting as a suitable
>> replacement Boot Manager, so the user either needs to use the firmware
>> boot manager to choose a bootloader (bootmgr.efi for Windows,
>> grubx64.efi for Fedora), or some other boot manager (rEFInd or
>> gummiboot).
> 
> Well, I see the point, but at the same time, we are finding out that in
> the Real World, it's a really bad idea to depend on the EFI boot manager
> because it just isn't being presented to the user in a sane way in
> enough of the real UEFI implementations. So we might actually want to
> keep that requirement, and fix up os-prober (which we're currently
> working on).
> 
> We'll have to see what pjones' take on that is.

The state of affairs with EFI boot managers being is not good, that's true. But GRUB doesn't fix this problem. It's a totally inadequate boot manager replacement on EFI right now. And it's unclear to me if that is even an eventual design goal of a future GRUB.

Not only is Windows not added to the GRUB menu, grub-mkconfig is presently unfriendly to prior Fedora and other Linux installations by displaying them differently (and their entries don't even work, Bug 964828). Further, GRUB still depends 100% on a static grub.cfg which can be totally disconnected from the actual boot options for the computer. GRUB doesn't produce menu entries from NVRAM, or from available boot loaders on the available EFI System partitions.

Despite highly variable interfaces, the built-in firmware boot managers do better than this. gummiboot does better. And rEFInd better still.

So I don't see the point of parity in the criterion for GRUB BIOS and GRUB EFI when it comes to the requirement to show both Fedora and Windows options.

>> 
>> I've only recently BIOS installed Windows 7, and it's two partitions
>> to an unpartitioned disk. I think for EFI installing Windows 7, it's
>> three partitions. For Windows 8 EFI, it's four partitions, so I'll
>> guess it's one less for BIOS.
> 
> What are the partitions?

For BIOS Win 7 installs, one is a Microsoft reserved partition. Windows 8 on UEFI, one such system's partition map is in bug 971255 and looks like this:

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048          616447   300.0 MiB   2700  Basic data partition
   2          616448          819199   99.0 MiB    EF00  EFI system partition
   3          819200         1081343   128.0 MiB   0C01  Microsoft reserved part
   4         1081344       122879999   58.1 GiB    0700  Basic data partition

The Windows on a single partition case is pretty rare in any case.


Chris Murphy